Take The Floor

Michel François is creating a theatre piece! The renowned Belgian visual
artist has been given an unambiguous commission by the
Kunstenfestivaldesarts to devise a piece to match the scale of the grand
theatre at KVS. With the involvement of his daughter, the young actress
Léone François, the artist intends to literally “put on stage” the
theatrical ritual and all the practical, technical and architectural
elements involved. Taking a candid look and with boundless energy, he
fills the theatre’s space, exploding all its codes and turning what is
left into a show in which the actors and audience, light and sound,
stalls and stage keep reversing their roles. Everything is there, but
everything has been shifted and rearranged differently. Forget all that
you thought you knew about theatre: brazenly frustrating expectations,
this new work offers an unusual experience and disrupts our way of
looking at things.

Asked
to devise a project for the stage, sculptor, video maker and
photographer Michel François decided to involve his daughter Léone, a
young actor, in the creation of this show-performance.

The
starting point, which motivates the appearance of the events seen on
stage, intends to be “executed” rather than commented on.

On the surface of it, Take The Floor is
an experimental show about sculpture or rather a show of sculpture.
About the possibility of it (or its resistance to) being dramatised.
About an image’s stirring capacity to suddenly appear out of the
material. To do this, the show plays on interactions between bodies,
personal stories, objects and materials, and the theatre itself becomes
the tool and the material for producing these events, these sculptural
actions. Out of a collection of materials and devices, summoned on stage
or already there, comes a sort of plastic symphony that plays on the
tensions between the animate and inanimate, control and improvisation,
order and chaos, oral narration and silent material.

A
relationship between a visual artist and an actor, and therefore a
confrontation between two disciplines that have two different
relationships to space and time. What is theatrical about sculpture?
What is sculptural about theatre? In a playground can you have a game
whose rules differ from the game for which the playground was designed?
What types of “synaesthetic” relationships (the shift from one sense to
another) exist between two fields of creation?

A relationship that
blends reciprocal desire, incomprehension and curiosity. Generally, the
two protagonists engage in a dialogue on the basis that it is a shared
“game”, and you might wonder at times who is the more mature: the older
man or the younger woman.

A relationship between a father and his
daughter. This more biographical part of the show involves a process of
transmission, even though it is contingent and indirect. Each “actor”
has a double on stage who acts simultaneously, slowing down the
processes, provoking parallel and complementary situations or repeating
events that have taken place.

The title of the show Take The Floor literally
means taking over the space, but also speaking in a debate, in a logic
of the baton being passed in a relay race. In fact, Michel François,
whose father was a painter and whose mother was a dancer, says he chose
sculpture as a “middle course between dancing and painting”, starting
out in theatre and then opting for something that he thought would give
him more freedom. Meanwhile, as a child, Léone was the reluctant subject
and model of her parents’ art forms, manipulating the works while being
manipulated by them, and she has chosen theatre as the place for
creating her own forms.

In Take The Floor, the theatre
stage is the place for showing and making public this network of
relationships. The dynamic and gliding space in which a baton is passed
between disciplines and generations. A story of interconnected skills
being confronted on a stage that has meanwhile become a sort of open and
spontaneous experimental workshop.

Theatre versus sculpture.
The liberal arts of the stage pitted against the more servile art of
painters and sculptors. What is meant by theatre is the minimum
conditions of a given space, time and audience. What is meant by
sculpture is the minimum conditions of a changing material. With that as
the starting point, the stage is a common place to be shared by two
disciplines, by two protagonists, by Michel and Léone François who each
follow their plan while regularly interacting so as to be crystallised
in a succession of images. Perhaps for Michel it is about using theatre
as a plastic material. Perhaps for Léone it is about using sculptural
material as a dramatic prop. Or vice versa.

However, beneath the
appearance of fun and exhilaration, beneath the appearance of a formal
procedure between sorcerer’s apprentices who are transforming a stage
into an open workshop, there is fairly certainly a profound and secret
relationship to pointlessness in this project. The pointlessness of
theatre (this superficial mechanism that is devoid of content), the
pointlessness of passing time (passing the artistic baton between a
father and his daughter), the pointlessness of objects and materials
that disintegrate and consume each other until they disappear, the
pointlessness of pretences disturbing perceptions. As if, through these
games of role and joyful experiences a muted solemnity is produced,
immediately counterbalanced by the fascinating power of the image.

Belgian artist Michel François (1956)
was born in Sint-Truiden. Using sculpture, photography, video and
installations, Michel François takes on, shakes up and questions a
reality through which he has become something of a nomad for some time.
From real life, Michel François takes, re-frames and repositions
fragments, zooms in on situations, fixes moments that, when highlighted,
translate the subjectivity of man and determine his singularity and
irreducibility into schemas and uniform models. Michel François’s deeply
playful, poetic and generous view turns the immediate environment into
an exotic and sensual show in which the acting and surprise, but also
the solemnity and incongruity, reveal the depth and density of mankind.
In keeping with his “channel-hopping” way of looking at things, Michel
François also works on staging the object by reformulating the
relationship between the work and the exhibition, making the
relationships between art and reality more dynamic. His exhibitions
include Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992; Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles,
1992; 22nd Sao Paulo Biennale, 1994; Witte De With, Rotterdam, 1997;
Kunsthalle in Berne, 1999; Venice Biennale 1999; Haus der Kunst, Munich,
2000; Art Pace Foundation, San Antonio, Texas, 2004; SMAK, Ghent, 2009;
Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, 2010; Mac’s Grand Hornu,
2012; CRAC, Sète, 2012; and IKON Birmingham 2014. He has also
collaborated on several occasions with the choreographers Anne Teresa De
Keersmaeker and Pierre Droulers. He teaches at the École Nationale des
Beaux-Arts in Paris.

After gaining a masters in drama from the Institut des Arts de Diffusion in Louvain-la-Neuve, Léone François Janssens now
expands her activities to include working alongside her father on a
show where their different disciplines meet. Formerly an assistant at
the La Fabrique Imaginaire company alongside Ève Bonfanti and Yves
Hundstad on the creations Tragédie Comique, Café du Port and Bonheur in
2013, she has extended her work as a theatre actor to performance and
film by way of television. Currently writing a dissertation on the
“Theatricality of Art”, she accepts that she is an actor who has always
been involved in visual art. In her writing and directing, she questions
the plasticity of the script and is interested in language and spaces
that are basically created by investing notions of “je” and “jeu”, I and
acting. She has appeared in theatre productions such as Sam Shepard’s Curse of the StarvingClass directed by Mireille Cherbonnier, 2008; Juan Mayorga’s Hamelindirected by Luc Van Grunderbeek, 2010; Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes froma Marriage directed by Michel Wright, 2011; Jean Racine’s Phèdredirected by Itsik Elbaz, 2012; Go to bed young dreamer, a new work by XavierLukomski, 2013; and Nuit d’été by Jean Michel d’Hoop, 2014. Film performances include the lead female role in the feature film Lone Wolf made by Axel de Ville and Sebastien de Buyl, 2012; the short films Washing Time and Synthèse by Julien Courivaud, 2013; I Am a Secret, a shortfilm by Coline Grando (festival Nikon), 2013; Baby Balloon, a feature filmby Stefan Liberki, 2013; and on TV the role of Eva in the series Typique for RTBF, 2011-2014.